Girl in a Box

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The heroes will occasionally discover a girl who, for whatever reason, has been placed in a box, usually in suspended animation (or failing that, a box with airholes). Most of the time, this is part of the introduction of a new major character. Sometimes she could simply come in a box in mint condition.

Notice the phrase itself in Japan means a rich/noble girl that is usually overprotected and knows little of the world and may even have little freedom. Compare with "a bird in a gilded cage". So Japanese works sometimes gives this metaphor a more physical meaning. There's even a movie from 1935 with the exact name, Hakoirimusume (literally, "girl in a box").

During a dream sequence in Eureka Seven, Anemone appears naked and in the fetal position in a refrigerator.

Hyatt, Ropponmatsu I, and Ropponmatsu II are introduced to ACROSS members this way in Excel Saga. This only applies to the anime, not the original manga.

The Frame Arms Girls turn up at Ao Gennai's doorstep in this fashion, courtesy of Kotobukiya drone delivery.

Hako-chan (literally "Box-chan"), from The Girl Who Leapt Through Space. Her appearance is still mostly unknown due to her not leaving the box yet, though we do learn that she has light skin. There was one point where she almost came out, but then Aleida convinced her that staying in the box was better because "being in the outside world is worse than being in the box". Admittedly, it does seem to be a pretty nice box: it has some sort of camera system allowing view outside, though not from outside in, and text can be displayed on the door of the box like it's a computer screen. Also, it apparently has some sort of hovering/movement device.

Izetta: The Last Witch begins with the title character being transported in a steampunk Suspended Animation pod to New Berlin by the Germanian military. Unfortunately for them, she wakes up enough to recognize her beloved Princess Finé, a prisoner on the same aircraft. One magical outburst later, her pod has been blasted open, the plane rent in two and the Germanians are short two important assets.

Another boy version happens in Kimi Wa Petto (or Tramps Like Us in the translation) with Momo.

Weird example. Princess Snow from MÄR. The first we see her, she's encased in ice, only to be freed (and accidentally kissed by) Ginta. This freaks him out since she looks, sounds and acts exactly like his childhood friend Koyuki. Oddly enough, the second time she needs to be rescued, she's inside of an ACTUAL box in a fetal position. A Rubix Cube-like deathtrap to be precise, which will kill her if not solved correctly and even if it's solved correctly will kill whoever solved it instead. Putting a bit of a dark spin on this trope.

Amusingly, Reality Ensues - Kyon immediately notices that his bag is a good 30 kilos heavier than it should be and catches her. In the anime he brings her along anyway, whereas in the light novels he sends her back home.

Lime, Cherry, and Bloodberry from Saber Marionette J are all introduced this way. They're also robot girls with their slavish devotion to the male protagonist preinstalled, so they hit this trope pretty hard.

Sgt. Frog: Keroro first met Angol Mois after finding her inside a closet that landed on Keron.

In the Millennium World arc of Yu-Gi-Oh!, we first meet Mana hiding in a large ceramic pot.

Comic Books

Ms. Marvel once featured a plot arc where The Puppetmaster was collecting superheroines, mind-controlling them and then selling them. He had teams out catching the women, and they would be shipped to his South American headquarters inside wooden crates.

The first issue of Jack Kirby's O.M.A.C. has the title character learning to his horror that the girl he likes is actually an android, built as part of an evil conspiracy. He learns this by finding her disassembled in a box.

Junior in Secret Six, due to a severe aversion to being seen, runs a criminal empire from inside a wooden crate, and travels inside a burlap sack.

Django Unchained: The first time that Django's wife Broomhilda is seen outside of flashbacks and fantasy sequences, she's naked in the "hot box" as punishment for trying to run away from Candieland, however the circumstances make it very much Fan Disservice.

Oblivion (2013): Julia Rusakova later Harper kicks things off when her escape capsule lands on Earth and Jack investigates.

Der Wixxer sees the Earl of Cockwood smuggling entire girl bands in suitably large wooden crates (at least judging by the one example revealed on screen).

In Clash of the Titans, which is based on the myth of Perseus, Princess Danae and her newborn son Perseus are shut into a box and thrown into the sea by Danae's dad Acrisios, who is angered that she has had a child despite him locking her away from men. Danae's lover and Perseus' father is the god Zeus, who instructs the sea god to ensure that Danae and her child are taken by the currents to a safe place, the island of Seriphos, where Perseus grows to adulthood.

Literature

The Girl in the Box: Jackie, the protagonist of the teen novel. In this case, the "box" in question is a cramped basement, where she's being held after being kidnapped for unknown reasons.

The Wheel of Time: A male example; Rand is captured by Aes Sedai, forced into a trunk and tortured on his way to the White Tower. He's rescued at Dumai Well's.

E.Veltistov wrote a series of books about the adventures of Electronic, a Ridiculously Human Robot in shape of a boy. The first book is titled "Electronic - a boy from the box"

Eva Luna: A bunch of girls who were about to be sold to a prostitution ring are kept in a locked crate with limited air inside. Their ship got stuck due to bureaucracy and the girls suffocate to death.

Across the Universe: Amy and the other passengers from old Earth are frozen into compartments, resembling boxes. Well, Amy is until Elder unplugs her.

The Long Ships: viking Toke smuggles a girl on a longship in a large chest.

Anathem: A small landing ship is pried open to reveal the corpse of a woman of an alien lineage, bearing an enigmatic clue. The avout rush to preserve her body for study.

The Thinking Machine: The solution to "The Problem of Dressing Room A" involves the missing actress having been hypnotized and then folded into one of the trunks of her room, so she was carried out with the rest of her luggage when the troupe moved cities.

Saffron, though it was less of an introduction and more of 'getting her on the ship without the other characters noticing'. Or possibly keeping her away from everyone long enough for them to work up a plan how to out-con her.

They get rid of her the same way, when Inara traps her in a dumpster.

A male variant, Tracey was introduced to the show in a coffin. Too bad the episode has Book Ends.

Later on in the episode The Emissary, K'Ehleyr, Worf's Love Interest, arrives at Enterprise in what is essentially a torpedo casing. (Getting there fast was imperative, so they really had to improvise.)

One episode dealt with a body found in a desert where the death pose was in an unusual position; turns out the girl had been attempting to smuggle herself into the country in a suitcase and died in it.

Another episode dealt with deaths at a circus, including one man who could contort his body into many shapes who was found in an extremely small box.

Yet a third dealt with "claustrophila," a confined-space fetish: a female practitioner (played by a real-life contortionist) allowed herself to be folded up in a large packing crate and mailed cross-town. Because the UPS delivery man didn't "handle with care," she was knocked out, asphyxiated, and arrived DOA.

Used by the protagonists several times, as well. Notably, Chuck hiding from an assassin in a coffin being transported by air, Casey and Sarah smuggling themselves aboard a train in coffins and subsequently imprisoning the Big Bad in one, (temporarily) and Sarah stowing away aboard an airplane having squeezed herself into a dufflebag.

NCIS had a gruesome twist on this trope in one episode, where the killer was avenging the deaths of three girls in a box. A group of officers, when they learned they were being sent home, arranged to ship their Asian girlfriends back to the States in a locked crate in the storage hold. But when their orders were changed at the last minute, none of them ended up on the same ship with the girls, who starved to death. The killer was the fourth girl, the only one who survived.

Blindspot opens with the main amnesiac character, named Jane Doe until her identity can be found, discovered naked in a duffle bag in the middle of Times Square. The CCT cameras for Times Square can see the duffle bag being dropped off, but not who did it.

In Redrum327, Gahui was locked in a safe in the middle of a forest by the rest of the cast (minus Gihu) as a child and left to die. She's rescued six days later, after tearing her own finger nails off trying to escape and nearly freezing to death during the raining days.

From Greek Mythology, Princess Danae and her newborn son Perseus were shut into a box and thrown into the sea by Danae's dad Acrisios, who had been told that Danae's child would kill and overthrow him. With some help from Perseus's biological father, the god Zeus, they were eventually found by the fisherman Dictys in a beach and he took both of them in.

According to Jewish tradition, this happened to Sarah from The Bible, because her husband was afraid she'd be taken by the Egyptians on account of her beauty.

The (male) baby Moses escapes Pharoah's order to throw every male child in the Nile when his mother makes him a basket covered in water-repellent pitch before sending him down the river. He's also promptly found by the Pharoah's daughter and raised as her own child.

Video Games

In Artificial Girl 2, the heroine awakens from a crate in the protagonist's room.

In To Heart 2: Another Days Silfa / HMX-17c makes her appearance being shipped in a box to Takaaki's house. She also uses the box as her hiding place.

One of the fighters in Cyberbots is a girl in a jar, who hijacked a robot to escape from the government facility where she was stored. She beats up everyone she comes across due to fear and extreme misunderstandings.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Ooccoo, the odd bird-like female, keeps getting herself stuck in crockery inside the various dungeons, and is only seen if Link finds and breaks the particular pot in which she's trapped.

Octavia in Tears to Tiara is found inside a box, tied up and helpless. Arawn decides he has enough women hanging around annoying him about how they're his wife or just being ditzy elves, so he decides to seal her back in and pretend he never saw her. Sadly, Arthur catches him and you recruit her instead.

In Killer is Dead, this is how Juliet (the heroine from Lollipop Chainsaw) makes a cameo. In Episode 51, a DLC chapter, if the player breaks open a barrel on a ledge that's shaking, Juliet leaps out and jumps away to the sound made in her own game when she uses her Big Jump move.

The bad ending for Haunting Ground has the main heroine trapped in a box at the end.

Rief in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, a male example, is kidnapped, trapped in a crate, and abandoned near Harapa in order to force the heroes to rescue him instead of following their original mission to Morgal.

Fatal Frame 2 had a ghost woman in a kimono box. She hid in the box to escape the Repentence, but died there.

In one Warriors Orochi 3 side mission, Gracia gets trapped inside a box that is sealed shut by Zhang Jiao's magic, leading Sima Yi and Masamune Date to fight Jiao and his brothers in order to break the spell to free her.

The Dolls (save for Cammy, Juni and Juli) are seen stashed inside capsules in Street Fighter IV's Juri OAV. This is because their Brain Washing process has damaged their bodies and minds almost beyond recognition, and their capsules either keep them frozen until they can be restored or are part of their medical treatment

During the rescue operation in Grisaia no Rakuen the Thanatos system's autonomous behavior is finally noticed by Ichigaya, who begin shutting out its systems. In response, it fights back as well as it can as well as sending JB to remove its core: Kazuki Kazami, who has been in a tube for years. When she gets out, she's so weak she can barely even stand, let alone walk, requiring JB to carry her out.

This is how Ibuki meets his first Cat Girl, Mikan, in Let's Meow Meow. She is curled up, naked, and sleeping in a cardboard box on the street which he happens to stumble upon on the way home. His response? "I was expecting to see a kitten. How disappointing." Let me remind you that this guy specifically wished on the Cat God to have his own catgirl and he has a catgirl fetish.

To be fair, he initially assumes that was a dream and she a crazy homeless girl in a cosplay outfit.

NekoPara: TWO catgirls in two boxes! They're the protagonist's stepsisters.

In an episode of The Botsmaster, a few of hero Zid Zoolander's Ridiculously Human Robots note their creator's crush on villainess Lady Frenzy. So they kidnap her and present her unconscious body in a box to ZZ on his birthday.

In the DCAU, Superman first finds Supergirl as the last frozen survivor of her homeworld.

Lampshaded in one episode of The Simpsons where Marge is eavesdropping on a cellphone conversation between Moe and Carl. According to Moe, Groundskeeper Willie ordered a mail-order bride from some other country, but refused to pay a shipping fee, resulting in the girl stuck in the crate at the post office. (We have to take Moe's word on this here, but weirder things have happened on this show...)

Real Life

This is supposedly how Julius Caesar and Cleopatra met for the first time (she was hidden in a rolled-up carpet, rather than a box, though).

Hugo de Groot, a Dutch writer in the 17th century was imprisoned in castle Loevestein. Every month the guards would replace his bookcase, which consisted of a large wooden trunk. Guess how he escaped.

In the pre-Civil War United States, some slaves managed to escape bondage by mailing themselves northward. The most famous of these was Henry "Box" Brown (not to be confused with a differentHenry Brown, inventor of the safe.* Amusingly enough.)

Many refugees have tried to smuggle themselves in ship containers with various degrees of success.

In 1961 a woman was smuggled from East to West Berlin in two suitcases. They were placed next to each other in the luggage rack with false sides making them one space, with her top half in one suitcase and legs in the other. She made it through.

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